Knoxville, Tennesse
(Gran Torino)
1-19-2003

At Neal’s Cabin
(Poem for Neal, Vaughn, Papaw, and Me)
2-18-2003

Indigo and chicory under yellow (yellow!) flick flack zick goes the bug-zapper zapping killing bitter black insects that bite sweet fat (virtually) hairless apes (should the opportunity arise, of course) and we play cards, or rather the beers play cards, alcoholic puppeteers knitting and quilting and sewing up a patchwork of medieval allegories embossed under-on-over slick white paper masquerading as cardboard but our voices are our own or rather they belong to the ghosts that will someday used to be us and they talk about women we don’t know anymore and a vermilion orb pretending to be a car and scars that never really healed and we/they/I lie about our/their/my life making it dramatic and exciting, the Hardy Boys recast and Vaughn describes the music and Sean looks at him not understanding because he is very very drunk but the Newcastle still remembers that he should discard the Queen of Spades and the overzealous specters of Mouseketeers (Annette and Cubby and that old fat guy) dance on a tarpaulin of curved glass across the room, pointillist masterworks in ballpoint pen and the whole world smells like wet brown leaves in November and I remember to pray for Momma’

twice.

Thp Thp Thp
2-26-2003

Thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp whispers leather on concrete
and I smile as my artificial universe (neon & fluorescent) nudges past
white
and under black
[God’s quiet calligraphy
noticed only by men(man) in soft gray sweatshirt(s)
named Eric with accent(s) that only show up
when he(they) is(are) tired who teach(es) people how to
doubt and wonder(s) what he(they) is(are) missing knowing
what he(they) is(are) missing wondering what he(they) is(are) missing
in Tennessee where yellow gingko ghosts make
Dr. Smith smile in November].

Chchungk goes the door to the car in the cement box.
Gkkrunch goes the engine when blue sparks meet brown gasoline.
Phrimmm go wheels across wet pavement by a river under stars

[that] can’t be (seen)(here).

Green yellow red green
And I am off again
Driving to places that are not here
Until I reach a gray building on a hill.

Imagine that you are behind a camera.
The camera slowly drops down from the purple-orange sky.

Fog.

Tonight {my wet-nurse} is a river of sad Japanese instruments
(And) my crib [is] a black wool coat
(warm
under
cold)

For a moment (my feet on gravel) I am ancient, or rather, I am young, in West Virginia before it existed

for me.

the realist's discourse
3-14-2003

i(you) am(are) nosferatu. (grin). fear me(yourself). look in the mirror. your teeth are not all flat. you are no herbivore. you do not graze. you are a(the) monster. small. weak. naked. scales are for dragons. grendel is a myth. so are nations. white red black & green are all one color in the dark. machiavelli is a rapper. hobbes is a cartoon tiger. bullshit. they are the only honest men that ever lived. ever. bleach cleans karma. there is no justice. honor is for the lovers of ribbon and metal. i(you) am(are) all sharp edges. punch glass with other mens’ hands. emotion is a distraction. all things are instruments. to live is enough. to rule is better. you are never safe. god doesn’t favor (you). cut yourself. [know you will die. if you forget it matters, you are free.] revolution is what fools call evolution when people are dying. sheep leave their dead. men eat them. wolves mourn. men worship(ed) them. paint your face. sit in the woods. listen to the green. know you are an animal. forget your language. kill something. eat it. live. shriek-scream-bellow-roar-wail. be nothing. hide. know everything.

Buttermilk and the Hardy Boys
4-30-2003

I sit in the bar and contemplate my mortality but its not a bar but rather a fiction the by-product of my own brown-pea green-lavender mind the ironwood-and-stinkweed tangle of neurons (electric blue popswishpop) a medieval imagination drunk on singing dancing bears and Mickey Mouse Club flashbacks and Lee doesn’t know who the Hardy Boys are and the girl in the yellow tube top with red hair and green eyes who obviously doesn’t eat enough is smiling at me in the gas station and I wink but the wink is just to make her look again and wonder what I know and she smiles and I smile and I walk out because I am that guy that fellow that some women are attracted to by accident women who taste like buttermilk on your lower lip when your lower lip is on the curve of their back but they don’t seem to be attracted forever because I am a gateway drug walking marijuana and after me they need cocaine or barbiturates or both or they go into a seven-step program because they need to get their life in order because they are mortal and they must breed pass on the DNA pass on the complexities of their social-political-economic conceptualizations the ones that my professors study when they are not too busy kissing their wives, their lower lips quite happy and their hair tangled because of fingernails that are searching in that hair like Lewis and Clark but one of the two committed suicide I can never remember which one but they are dead and I wonder if their DNA is still floating around slipping through another woman’s fingers and I know this poem is probably at least a little sexist I mean I don’t want it to be sexist but being a man I find it quite difficult to write from the perspective of women and I make my students write the word human and I am a human you can tell because I have opposable thumbs and a complex cerebrum that I am gradually killing here in my imaginary bar with my imaginary friends while I think about Joe and Frank and women who taste like buttermilk and I drink my beer again and listen to the song about God and wonder how it is I have kissed so many women because I remember being the awkward little nerd who few people liked and fewer respected but now men and women and some dogs respect me and those who don’t still don’t have the guts to look me in my dark hazel eyes and tell me because the age of men willing to be honest and brave and powerfully indignant is done and over just like new Coke and democracy but for those of you who don’t respect remember this remember that I was voted most artistic, Stacy and I were, and artists are the only people with insights into God that don’t involve cruelty or vengeance but creation and shivers down my back make me want a girl leaning on it asking me to come to bed but she isn’t here but working too late or in another state or married or just in my head quiet and shy and an object for poems that I don’t share with other people and so I type long rambling poems and Walt Whitman shakes his shaggy Karl Marx/Albert Einstein hairdo back and forth embarrassed for me that I missed the point but I don’t care because I like Dumas better and if anyone could ramble with style than by-God it was Dumas.

(I tactically pause to drink from my beer and consider a new line of thought)

So, I bought an American flag the other day for twenty-eight dollars and ninety-six cents.